Summary of the Global Warming evidence

Surface measurements have various major sources of error, which have to be guestimated away in an ad hoc manner. The only data that is arguably good enough to estimate the rather small changes in climate is Australia, Britain, and the US – which on the whole have not been warming as measured by surface instruments. And even for them, the warming estimated from surface instruments is rather similar to various sources of error, that have to be “corrected”. The main contribution to global warming as measured by surface instruments comes from sources where you can get any result you want by rather arbitrarily deciding some data is good enough to include, and some data is not, by cherry picking particular events – for example warm nights indicate America is warming, but hottest days indicates America is cooling. You can always find one indicator to be alarmist about, but on the whole, where our data is good, surface instruments indicate little or no global warming. Because our surface instrument database is noisy, inaccurate, and incomplete, there is plenty of room to spin it any way one pleases.

Recent changes in the icecaps indicate slight warming over the last thirty years ago, though the antarctic icecap has increased by almost the same amount as the arctic icecap has decreased, but the icecaps still have substantially more ice than a hundred years ago. The landing sites of early antarctic explorers are now behind a vast barrier of thick, and very old, ice impenetrable to icebreakers. A century ago there was too much open water at the North Pole, even in midwinter, to access it by dog sled, yet today, you can access it by dog sled in winter. Early attempts to reach the North Pole by dog sled had huge problems with open, ice free areas of water. Recent efforts to recreate those trips using identical equipment just took a straight line over solid ice.

The worlds biggest glaciers, the ones in the Himalayas are growing. Greenland glaciers are arguably shrinking, but by a miniscule amount. Glaciers do not tell you today’s weather as compared to yesterday, but today’s weather as compared with a very long time ago. Which fits with the experiences of arctic and antarctic explorers a century or so ago. Different glaciers are giving different indications, which is consistent with the conjecture that some years, some decades, and some centuries are warmer, and others are cooler.

So, lukewarming is true, for the moment, natural variation is true, and catastrophic warming is not true.

71 Responses to “Summary of the Global Warming evidence”

It occurred to me that some amount of global warming would cause, at least the Antarctic, ice cap to grow. Say for example the local summer average high temp is 10 below (F). If the global temp rises 1 degree the South Pole is now 9 below, still frozen, but in the rest of the world there is more ocean evaporation and more moisture in the air and hence more precipitation and more ice at the South Pole. As long as it stays below freezing it is a moisture sink, and ice will continue to build up like on the coils of your freezer when the defrost doesn’t work.

This “summary” is a bad joke – nearly as sickening as your pedo rape fantasies. To wit, you are wrong about the unreliability of surface based temp measurement. This old canard is dragged out again and again, to the point that there were exhaustive studies done on this in 2009-2010 (which you are free to look up. – see the international surface temperature initiative).

As for the ice – there’s a difference between sea ice and land ice. Antarctica’s land ice has been melting quick as fuck. Sea ice is frozen, floating seawater, while land ice is ice that’s accumulated over time on land. Overall, Antarctic sea ice has been stable so far — but that doesn’t contradict evidence that the climate is warming. And of course you didn’t mention permafrost – which has become less and less “permanent” almost everywhere, melting more and for longer durations as temps increase. This shit is particularly bad because of all the carbon locked up in the permafrost that can be expected to contribute to the problem when it finally truly melts.

If anyone is cherry picking data and throwing away what they don’t like, it’s clearly people like yourself. But hey, you’re old right? What do you give a shit about the climate for.

Stick to programming. Your tendency to make pronouncements on other topics doesn’t serve you well.

I have myself personally attempted to reconstruct global temperatures from a collection of surface of records. It rapidly became obvious that depending on how I went about it, I could make the global temperature go up, or down, or dance the WaTutsi, using entirely reasonable, or at least quite plausibly defensible, assumptions. The data is ill suited to the task, and has to be tortured to fit, and there are lots of equally valid ways of torturing it.

Antarctic sea ice is not stable. It is growing and has grown a lot, almost as much as the arctic has shrunk. Himalayan glaciers are not stable. They have grown a lot. Your favorite data is arctic sea ice. Over thirty years, arctic sea ice has shrunk abut a million square kilometer – which means we will have ice free arctic summers in about a hundred to a hundred and fifty years. Big whoop. The arctic was ice free four thousand years ago, and yet the world failed to end.

Poster girl principle applies. Your favorite data is seriously underwhelming. Therefore, all the data you are piously ignoring, like antarctic ice, is even more seriously underwhelming.

Arctic ice is your favorite. Therefore, the most doomful. And it is not very doomfull at all.

But even if they had been sincere, even if they were looking for the truth, rather than ammo with which to attack European civilization, sincerity cannot get a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The data was not gathered for this purpose, and really is not useful for this purpose.

Q: is it warmer now than when Al Gore won the Nobel Prize and made that movie scaring everyone about nonlinearity?
A: no
Q: is there positive nonlinearity to warming?
A: if there were, it would have been triggered long ago. There was an ice age with ten times the current co2.
Q: is New Orleans going to flood again?
A: yes, as long as the city is run by niggers, it will flood

But, as long as we have cucks like Bush as President, then we can’t make New Orleans livable again. I think you are assuming whites would run it, but Louisiana has “Bobby” Jindal governing, so Indians might take it. That could be an improvement, I don’t know. My only acquaintance from there was really smart, academically, but a libtard. I still pray for them during hurricane season, and am glad Trump is ready for it this year. I expect no stormy “natural disasters” under his reign.

“From where the energy coming from” is, obviously, from heat trapped in the atmosphere by carbon burned up by humanity.

You write like the swedish muppet character speaks. Excuse the ad-hom, it’s late and I’ve just realized I have to stop looking at this blog, that I will never understand the human condition. It’s like taking a peek inside the discussion room of the german high command during ww2 – fascinating, in a way, but far more sickening. The solution :

Without going into the debate of “is the data accurate, how accurate is it, which interpretation is correct” etc., which I have no special expertise on (and neither does anyone here, I would guess), the main concern is:

1. weather is an incredibly complicated system full of feedback loops, both positive and negative.

3. changes to climate on a global scale pose an existential threat (as opposed to changes on a local scale, which can be compensated for by food production elsewhere).

Given these three facts, fucking with the global weather system by, say, measurably changing the composition of the atmosphere is incredibly dangerous. I have no clue whether a gigantic negative feedback loop means we are completely safe, or if we’re moving towards a tipping point after which we will be totally screwed.

Given that this is all unknown, extreme caution – limits on global emissions, etc. – is called for in my opinion. The political question, of how this can or should be organized, is of course another matter entirely. Luckily, it is very possible that Moore’s Law for solar (rapidly decreasing costs) will do most of the work for us.

Was not the arctic supposed to melt by now, resulting in the extinction of the poor polar bears?

One day man is blamed for drought in California, the next day blamed for floods in California. Were not the oceans going to rise five feet?

A significant reduction of carbon emissions, without a corresponding increase in nuclear power, will require the deaths of many billions of people, and the priesthood announces itself eminently qualified to decide who will die.

Food production for the kind of population we now have requires industrial civilization, and no one has made any serious proposals for actually reducing carbon emissions by a significant amount, without dismantling some substantial part of industrial civilization – generally the part owned and operate by people they do not much like. The Paris accord amounted to “Lets’s get rid of flyover country, even though that is going to only make a minute difference to carbon emissions”

Reflect on how much injury the Paris accord was going to do to hated enemy groups of whites, and how little effect it was going to have on carbon emissions.

For the record, I am pro-nuclear (and an optimist on fusion too). It would please me quite a lot if the US invested in new nuclear power plants.

Your comment on the arctic melting has no (polar) bearing on my point [couldn’t resist the pun]. So some old projections were wrong, possibly (I’m taking your word on it for now); I’m not relying on projections whatsoever to argue for caution, it is purely from (a) uncertainty and (b) asymmetric risks (which are potentially existential if increased CO2 concentration causes major changes in weather patterns, regardless of whether “average global temperature” increases).

[And yes, man-made changes can result in more extreme weather, resulting in both floods and droughts, this is no contradiction. Whether the California drought specifically was man-made, I’m not sure and I don’t think we can ever say for sure.]

Your argument on uncertainty and asymmetric risks reminds me of a joke.

A man walks through a desert dragging a car door with him. He encounters a nomad who with great surprise asks: ‘why are you dragging a car door with you?’ The man answers: ‘well, the door keeps away lions who want to eat me.’
‘But there are no lions around here!’
The man grins. ‘See, it works!’

I’m quite familiar with this joke. It’s a good joke, but easy to over-use.

In finance, they have a concept known as “stress-testing”. They take a portfolio of assets and simulate various market conditions. Often, they will simulate the most severe market crash to date; if the portfolio can absorb this shock without collapsing completely in value, it is deemed “safe”.

The problem of course is that shocks that exceed all previous experience are actually relatively common. In college, I once attended a recruitment event for Barclay’s, in which a bigwig exec was giving a speech. She’d been at Lehman when it ran aground in 2008, and as this was only in 2010 or so, she clearly was still rather sore about this. [That Barclays would make someone from Lehman, which had collapsed, into a bigwig was already sort of disconcerting to me.] She went on and on about how 2007-2008 was “unprecedented”, a “12-sigma event”, which was “like flipping a hundred coins and landing all heads”. After her speech I went to the group of suck-ups huddled around her, elbowed my way to the front, and asked how she could say such stupid things – if it were really so unlikely, it wouldn’t have happened, period. [If I flip a coin 100 times and get all heads, I’m going to be pretty sure something is up with the coin rather than just go, “oh that was really unlikely wasn’t it”.] Predictably, she was not terribly happy about this question and ranted about how the Federal Reserve failed to save them (as if it was obligated to!), blah blah blah.

The point is, in opaque and complex systems like this, you have to prepare for the unprecedented. You won’t see the elephants coming.

OK, but the historical record is that we are in grave danger of an ice age, and in no danger at all from whatever it is that CO2 emissions are likely to cause.

You say that maybe CO2 will cause unexpected disaster, and maybe it will, but maybe failure to emit CO2 will cause unexpected disaster. On the evidence of history, the latter is enormously more likely.

I am, however, absolutely certain that dismantling industrial civilization will cause disaster.

Yes, that is exactly my point, hence why I also said the joke is easy to over-use. Depending on the characteristics of your situation, sometimes it is wise to prepare for the lions. If you are in a desert where lions are known not to exist and you can see for miles anyway, no need; if you’re in the savanna and the grass is tall, then maybe you ought to be careful.

Climate is one such area because it is completely unclear how much change is required to push it out of its present equilibrium and into a new one – and also unclear how fast such a change might occur once a tipping point is reached.

Reducing emissions is of course only one aspect of this; another is reducing our dependence on trade, so that we are not caught up in a worldwide toppling of the dominoes. The banks in 2007 were not just caught off-guard about how severe the subprime mortgage crisis was going to be; they were also all interdependent, so the crisis threatened to bring all of them down at once.

Judging from your friendly responses you seem more a fool than a bad person.

Unfortunately you’ll find that all the important people pushing anti-climate change industry behind the scenes are bad people, people who proclaim that they are saving the earth while they are in fact quite obviously waging war on industrial civilisation. To these people, you are a useful idiot.

I’ll take that as a compliment. I understand that I’m regarded as a “cuck” (or equivalent) here, since I’m still to the left of Genghis Khan.

But just because leftism is generally pernicious doesn’t mean that every last position associated with it is wrong. When all these unrelated issues snap into alignment, it makes me suspicious of both sides. “Those people are baddies, and they think X, therefore we will think not-X” is not sound logic.

Finally, I think you’re severely exaggerating the motivations of even the worst of the leftists. Nobody is working for the abolishment of industrial civilization. The worst are those who see inflicting harm on certain people (who are always conservative whites, what a coincidence) as a feature rather than a bug. Those people gross me out, but they are trying to control industrial civilization rather than destroy it. And none of it means they’re wrong about environmental risk; after all the Nazis were one of the first governments to wage a public-health campaign against smoking.

Right, now that the warming was obviously a stupid lie, it’s just weather changes which are scary. If the liberals of the 20s had been like they are today the entire Midwest would have been declared parkland and restocked with Indians and Somalians following the Dust Bowl.

Neither you nor I have the expertise to really evaluate this. Richard Muller is a clearly smart and independent guy (started as a skeptic and darling of the conservatives) who has examined the data and concluded that warming is real. Of course, this does not prove that warming is real; but it does prove that it is not “obviously” false.

My point is that changes which could affect weather patterns all over the globe are really scary. A drought in, say, Southeast Asia can be a local disaster; but it can’t wreck the entire supply chain and can be compensated for by undisturbed agriculture elsewhere. Major changes in many different places simultaneously, however, could be really disastrous.

A measurable change to atmospheric composition has the potential to wreak havoc everywhere at once, and any economic gains made while ignoring this is basically to picking up nickels in front of a steamroller (to use an analogy from finance).

I am not suggesting that you believe every climate scientist or every climate lobby. I am not suggesting that you stop questioning the motives of the gross people who cheer every time thousands of coal miners lose their jobs. I am suggesting that perhaps there are good reasons to be wary of the effects human activity can have on the environment (too tired to think of a less loaded word), and to try to protect ourselves against unpleasant surprises.

(1) global warming is true, as Arrhenius said a hundred years ago, geometric increases in CO2 lead to arithmetic increases in global temperatures, as in single degree increases

(2) the fact that there was an ice age with 4000ppm proves that ice ages depend much more on the shapes of the continents and oceans and orbital variations affecting where sunlight goes than CO2. So does the near perfect fit of Milankovitch quasicycles to temperature records over the past few hundred thousand years.

(3) Milankovitch proved why ice ages happen in the ’50s. Had he been able to do that 20 years earlier, Al Gore et al would have “learned” about it in college, and we would never have heard about global warming.

(4) For the past 500 years, from puritanism to global warming, every bad idea has had universities as its major cheerleader, with the prestige of the university as a major argument, which prestige is enhanced by the impact of each bad idea.

No climate change is not scary, because the climate changes all the time, by amounts much larger than anything humans are likely to cause. Four thousand years ago, the arctic was ice free in summer. The world did not end, indeed, no one noticed.

The motivation for global warming “science” is to demonize industrial civilization, to demonize what europeans created. The destruction of industrial civilization, now that is scary.

You make the mistake of assuming that every person advocating caution has the same motivation.

Very few people explicitly are against industrial civilization, or European civilization. Surely some have a vague feeling of being against it for ideological reasons, in a sort of mood-affiliation way. I am explicitly against those people; but regardless of their motivations there are reasons to be very careful.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – no friend of the globalists, no friend of the radical “New Left”, no friend of the puritanical university set – takes the cautious view as well, and for the same reasons as I do: because of asymmetric risks.

The world did not end 4000 years ago for two reasons: (1) the important thing is not whether there is ice in the arctic, the important thing is whether this year’s weather roughly matches last year’s, and (2) because the world was more robust back then.

If one region (say, the Eastern Mediterranean circa 1200 BC) suffered devastation, another would still thrive. But the world has become like the financial system circa 2007 – incredibly interdependent and therefore vulnerable to extreme shocks.

Fact is, when, in a hundred years or so, the arctic melts in summer, no one is going to notice, and no one is going to care, unless they live there. And four thousand years ago, no one noticed either.

I moved from one area to another area, where the difference in year round average temperatures is twelve degrees centigrade. People live and farm and do fine in both areas. If the world gets twelve degrees hotter, the tropics will become substantially less habitable, and Siberia and Antarctica a lot more habitable. A few million years ago, Antarctica had forests and big animals. If the change is gradual, people and crops will gradually move.

A twelve degree rise is not going to matter if it happens slowly enough for people to adjust. A one degree rise over a hundred years is certainly not going to matter. For most people a twelve degree rise would merely mean that their grandfather grew apples, and they grow mangoes, and their cattle are less shaggy than their grandfather’s cattle, and a one degree rise is not perceptible at all.

Which is exactly what the Official Science says: the official economics. All the doomsaying is physicists making statements about economics.

No one points that out, which shows the whole thing is a scam even if the physics is not a scam (which it very likely is not, but rather a combination of gross negligence considered par for the course in academia and grantsmanship).

But, the Dust Bowl was caused by bad, arrogant, stupid farming ruining the land. They were greedy, and God punished them. Farmers can be sinners too. So the bigger issue is why we don’t have better farmers. I think they need the help of gardener saints (seriously, just like hunter and fishermen saints).

Your argument assumes that global warming might have large effects. We have been emitting CO2 for a while, and it simply is not true that we are seeing effects that are distinguishable from past climate fluctuations.

Your favorite indicator is arctic ice, and in thirty years, arctic ice extent has not changed a whole lot.

You yourself admit that arctic ice is declining (and all the data I’ve seen suggests a fairly dramatic decrease), and counter with “but antarctic ice is increasing, so it all comes out in the wash”.

Once again, for the sake of argument, I will take your word on this.

My point was precisely that average temperature isn’t the important measure. If the Northern Hemisphere is getting steadily warmer and the Southern steadily colder, this is just as worrying. Not to mention that we never know when we will hit a tipping-point (where positive feedback loops begin to overpower negative ones) and cause an acceleration or sudden changes.

Of course we could already be over the tipping point, or natural fluctuations will put us over a tipping point, etc. So just limiting emissions is not enough; we have to make ourselves, as a nation, more robust against major disruptions in global trade . This suggests that we should make a move towards autarky and away from dependence on trade. Buy American! A couple of posts ago you mentioned the Bronze Age Collapse. That collapse was so severe because those economies were too interdependent, and fell like dominoes. Same deal.

You yourself admit that arctic ice is declining (and all the data I’ve seen suggests a fairly dramatic decrease)

You have not seen any data. You have only seen spins. No warmist actually looks at the data, because the data is a thought crime. A warmist only dares to hear what other warmists say about data that those other warmists have not actually looked at themselves either. I have seen the data, and if the current rate of decline continues, arctic summers will be ice free in a hundred and fifty years or so – as they were four thousand years ago.

Over the past thirty years, the summer arctic ice area has declined about fifteen percent or so, maybe twenty percent or so – hard to say exactly how much, because the year to year variation is also about that much. Which projects to zero in a hundred and fifty years or so. Maybe a hundred years or so, depending on how you squint when you look at the graph.

That is not dramatic. And if you had ever seen any data you would know that.

And if you look at any other indicator, for example Himalayan glaciers, Antarctic ice, Maple Syrup Season, it is even less dramatic The Arctic is melting a little, Greenland rather less, the Himalayas and Antarctica are freezing up. By and large, the further from the Arctic, the less global the warming.

“The Arctic is melting a little, Greenland rather less, the Himalayas and Antarctica are freezing up. By and large, the further from the Arctic, the less global the warming.”

You really seem to be ignoring what I am saying in favor of addressing things I have not said. I am not concerned about “Global Warming”, I am concerned about “Climate Change” (I really don’t like using their term for it, but it fits).

I have said several times already: if the Arctic is melting and Antarctica freezing up, this does not simply come out in the wash.

Of course we could already be over the tipping point, or natural fluctuations will put us over a tipping point, etc

Historically, the problem is tipping back into an ice age. You are talking about humans causing one degree warming a hundred years, but when we came in and out of the ice age, that was ten degrees warming, and ten degrees cooling, in a hundred years or so.

Anthropogenic warming is not like pouring concrete over a daisy. It is more like spitting into a storm tossed ocean.

“Anthropogenic warming is not like pouring concrete over a daisy. It is more like spitting into a storm tossed ocean.”

Why does it have to be like either? The Earth is big, but humanity is pretty fucking big too now. I’d say it’s more like putting a thimbleful of vinegar into your morning cup of coffee – it’s still much more coffee than vinegar, but you’re probably going to taste the difference.

Where I live the landscape colors have changed,and there’s no more ‘true winter,’ as in occasional snow. I don’t mind the milder temperature, it’s pleasant. But I want summer rain, thunder and lightning for fun, and /pretty clouds. This selfish attitude of mine is why we get weird weather. But at least I pray for the weather we need, which is “seasonable” (what my church calls it, kind of natural or appropriate) and deserved. And we have to respect mysteries- what if sea coral dying off is good?

I am told by marine biologists that slightly warming oceans cause algae blooms, poisoning cute sea mammals through their food supply eating algae. I disagree. The problem is that this is a plague, sent down by God. We must repent, and then the oceans will heal. I also feel bad about ocean trash killing turtles, and even mammals getting their necks caught in plastic garbage. That is a serious issue, but so is roadkill, something nobody does ‘activism’ or politics about.

The sky’s color has changed too. I think digital photography did this. We do affect the world, but we don’t know how. I like that saints too do not know how they change the weather when preventing disasters or ending droughts. God does the work!!!

If global warming was dramatic, we would see dramatic graphs of total ice area all over the place (not the anomaly, the total area, with the base of the graph at zero area). That you have never seen such a graph, just officially eminent scientist officially telling you that such a graph is officially dramatic, should tell you it is undramatic.

how do you expect it not to have been triggered at some point in the last billion years since Fe stopped being a significant component of the oceans and CO2 stopped being a significant component of the atmosphere and O2 became common

I don’t claim that a tipping point must exist. I claim that we should be cautious because it’s very plausible that one could exist and if it does it could spell disaster. Really, read what I write before you answer.

Many different tipping points were triggered in the last billion years. There were palm trees at the poles at one point. Ice ages are caused by positive feedback loops – more ice —> more heat reflected back into space —> more ice. There are several plausible mechanisms for a positive feedback loop for warming too.

Q: why is NYC chillier than Rome?
A: the shapes of continents and oceans

And no, that is not why there are ice ages. Ice ages for the past few 100ky are driven by the Milankovitch quasicycles which affect how much sunlight hits what latitudes, which have more or less continents and oceans. Before then, ice ages were driven by where the continents and oceans were and presumably also the Milankovitch quasicycles.

‘The butterfly effect’ as a concept is something conceived of by liberally minded persons, which are inherently nominalistic, and hence, have difficulty in exercising discrimination between various elements, are unable to see any one thing as having much more import than any other.

In their mind, even the slightest happenstance, like a Straight White Male microaggressing a Person Of Feces, can have exponential cascading catastrophic effects elsewhen. It is difficult for them to conceive of the fact that various ontological phenomena can have more or less *inevitability* than others.

This conception of reality as a rube goldberg machine vulnerable to the slightest interference also ties into the ironic tendency of a solipsistic leftoid, while inveighing nostrums of communistic leveling, to simultaneously believe in and advocate the universal power of an almighty state, infinitely capable of recontrolling, reengineering, or redefining anything it may wish.

The butterfly effect is for people who identify as caterpillars, like being “temporarily fat” (from an actual fatties’ dating profile, or in male terms, “I’ll get rich when…”). They’re wishing for a better self and experience/life. That’s not inherently liberal, but it is vain-hope,thus close to progressivism. Maybe I’m quibbling, but this difference is important to me.

Next, nominalists simply have overly (disbalanced) verbal minds. They have trouble thinking without relying on their verbosity, from vocabulary to syntax. That’s their way to express their values, formulate plans, and understand the world. They may have enormous book collections, or “advanced degrees,” but little wealth. They’re nerds, if not gnostics.

Liberals can be sensual and physical, as in the ongoing fake ‘blood and soil’ meme. That’s obviously fake, because farmers are mostly apolitical here, not involved in warfare (agrarians lost in the Civil War). Liberals also live theatrically, as if guns are props and satire is violence. That’s socio-emotional nominalism.

I do believe every soul counts, which sounds like BLM’s ideology, but is modified- some souls matter more, and all are unique, not generic. Only humans and angels have spirits; animals only have souls. So what if my soul is more important, in God’s eyes, just because I pray to Him regularly? Liberals will say that needs to be regulated, researched, and voted on (pharisaical bureaucratizing). Prog’s say I need to be even holier, and reject me on perfectionist grounds (so they are ingrates). I have both of these temptations or ‘insecurities,’ but I know better.

Perhaps you don’t seem to grasp the relevance of the reference here, or you don’t seem to know what the butterfly effect is.

Nominalism, in formal etymological terms, is a philosophical doctrine concerning essences, generalities, or types. Specifically, that it denies such things being the case to one degree or another. Obviously, such is the essence (PNI) of the demotist/leveling tendency that typifies leftist thought.

Praxically, through the epistemological magic of stereotyping and memetic mutation, ‘nominalist’ becomes a conditional descriptor, referring to a being that is conditionally solipsistic, whose poverty of world formation capacity (imagination, *genius*), is such that they *literally cannot conceive* of such things in the first place; to think teleologically is an alien state of mind.

As i have mentioned at times in the past, *political* differences so often find their genesis in *epistemological* differences; it’s easy to consider some thing valueless if you *hardly even see it in the first place*.

(Something can’t be both wrong and nonexistent)

You will find that such modes of thought lie at the root of many theoretical edifices of rationalization discharged by leftwards types throughout history. One particularly egregious example might be that ill-fated coterie of late medieval scholastics who, themselves, were literally called the Nominalist Theologians, who undid the Aquinian synthesis, and thus opened the door to hasten the protestant degeneration to come.

The particular seeds sewn by this chapter have been picked up on and used as ammunition by nearly every other leftoid thinker in history from then-on to now, for good reason; nominalism is more or less a formalization of anti-thought, for cognition in the first place is predicated on the ability to derive useful generalizations from limited information. Hence, it is an acid that dissolves everything it touches, and is highly virulent, spreading easily upon contact with a credulous thinker who would apply its logical consequence further, each particular thinker stopping only here or there through unprincipled exceptions, of which of course there were many over the slow transformations of history.

Things such as critical theory, the Deconstructionism of the late post-moderns (and isn’t history full of such subtle ironies), are simply the most particularly naked expressions of such inherited nominalism heretofore. And of course, it never is *truly* applied consistently and universally; in the first place, because it is impossible anyways, and more pertinently wrt power dynamics, it is always applied *tactically*, to dissolve and declare ‘non-existent’ (and thus implied, ‘illegitimate’), whatever objects poke the writer in the insecurities (see for instance the never-ending attempts to undefine race), while naturally leaving his *own* conceits out of such attention.

It has all sprouted up over time into a wonderfully horrendous tangle of blighted roots and choking weeds that has pretty much become the ever-present backdrop and and underlining of modern western society (and thus the world in general). Specters of the failed enlightenment project haunt the popular discourse to this day; people using their forms of argumentation and standards of evidence, without even knowing the provenance.

An ideology is most dominant, after all, when it stops being thought of as an ideology, rather than ‘just something that is the way things are’. To an otherwise ordinary but well-meaning and earnest man, turning back on the ideology would seem like turning back on the idea of *goodness itself*. To be so defined, that is it’s power. To repudiate such privileged rhetorical real-estate, to *meme*, is one of the most valuable things a virtuous man can do today.

The Butterfly Effect, and Chaos Theory in general, is a perfectly well-formulated mathematical phenomenon. As math, and not ideology, it is not affected whatsoever by your weird political lens.

Regarding the “microaggression” bit here, I have to say you’re really going off the deep end in assuming what I’m talking about. A human being should have some strength; anyone whose life can be ruined by a microaggression – “exponential cascade” or not – should seek a refund on their upbringing. I’m part Asian, and leftist friend once asked me how I deal with microaggressions. My immediate urge was to break my beer glass over his head. But I had enough self control to simply explain that nobody with any self-respect would allow their life to be seriously hampered by microaggressions.

In other words, you can bring up a human being with self-respect, so that such tiny adversities simply bounce off or even give them strength. If someone has had such a stunted education that they feel seriously threatened by “negativity”, need a “safe space”, etc. – I regard that as not my problem at all. Nature, on the other hand, cannot be trained and must be handled with more care.

As in many of these sorts of situations, there is the motte: a well defined principle with liberally applied conservative rigor remanding itself to a certain niche, useful and appropriate within that niche; and then there is the Bailey: how people are actually using the words, concepts, and other things ‘out in the wild’, in their contests for social supremacy, heedlessly inflating the scope of a thing while trying to retain the same connotations associated with it, in order to occupy greater amounts of rhetorical high ground in the discourse, while hoping noone notices the disconnect.

‘The butterfly effect’ can refer to a certain theory, it also refers, the way it is being used here, to illustrate a certain *mindset*, described in previous entries, that engages with reality in certain stereotypical manners; the rube goldberg machine conception of reality, where all states of affairs, big or small or anywhere in between, are each and all wholly contingent accidents of a constellation of contingencies, where the slightest change anywhere would cause radically different states of affairs further down the line. A mindset, in short, that has no mind for that which is more essential, inevitable, transcendental, and other synonyms.

One can find abundant easy topical examples of expressions of such mindsets in areas such as speculative historical fiction, or the worlds of fanfiction in general really.

Regarding the other matter, i understand that dry humor can sometimes be impenetrable, and you certainly seemed to focus on that part a lot more than i did when writing it. The point there simply is to have drawn an illustration, where other examples may also do, but this in particular because the simultaneous apparent incongruity between the subject matter conjoined with the fact that a connexion is somehow made anyways is a time honored method of comedy.

And also because it’s always good to get a dig in on hysterical proglings anyways, for reasons you describe and more.

Agriculture is always done in anticipation of what the weather will be, when the rains tend to come, when it tends to get warmer and colder and by how much, etc.

If a big change happens to global weather patterns – say, the Gulf Stream slows suddenly – this can severely damage agricultural output in many different regions simultaneously. And because weather / climate is such a complex dynamic system, with all sorts of feedback loops, it is perfectly plausible from a mathematical standpoint that a seemingly minor change can have catastrophic effects, even over the short term.

Hence, my suggestion that we should be quite cautious about fucking around with this system.

True. A big sudden change would be problematic. But that is not how climate change works. It is a slow and gradual process. Over the time it takes to warm by a degree or two crops are likely to change anyway for unrelated reasons.

Nominalism, consistently applied, would cause someone to doubt the existence of the chair he sits on, or at least the likelihood of it continuing to support his backside. He therefore applies it selectively, applying it consistently to disbelieve in some things, and inconsistently applying an unprincipled exception to continue believing in other things, like the continued chair like behavior of the chair on which he sits.

But the disbelief is apt to spread corrosively, leaking through his unprincipled exceptions.

If natural kinds only exist in our minds, not in reality, you cannot predict that mermaids are unlikely, nor that your chair will continue to support you, except by making an unprincipled exception to nominalism, which is in practice necessarily applied in a selective manner.

Every time you place your bum on a chair and expect it to hold you up, you show that you believe that chairs are a natural kind.

Because weather is such a complex, nonlinear system, with all sorts of feedback loops, big sudden changes are completely plausible [the Dust Bowl is an example of a sudden change].

To respond to jim, above, a chair and the weather are completely different, with completely different behaviors. Go ahead and predict what the weather will be two months from now; meanwhile, the chair will still be a chair. There is nothing “unprincipled” about this; neither is it an “exception”.

this makes, what, the fourth or fifth time we’ve caught you assholes fudge packing the raw data to get the result you wanted? global cooling in the 70s, Michael Mann’s hockey stick, the email dump, etc.

something else to keep in mind, we are ALREADY PAST the “10 year tipping point” that Al Gore lied about in “An Inconvenient Truth”. and NONE, precisely zero of his near term predictions have come true.

As Jim claims, they have to be ever more and more insane, to stay on the cutting edge of this holier-than-thou spiral. Thank God, that the warming is dubious at the best! They would even need some apparent cooling. Because one is holy enough only if he sees warming when it’s actually a cooling under way. And one is holy enough only if he sees this pretended warming as the direct consequence of the “anthropogenic CO2 emissions”.

They like it this way. They need to be wrong. It would be just too easy for them if they were right. Now, they need a lot of effort and creativity to maintain their bullshit. Which brings up the holiest of them to the top.

I am going to a conference in London and reading HMGovernment’s 2000 page long report on “Evidence of Climate Change” and a vast program of infrastructure adaptation. The evidence is poor but I an engineer and fancy infrastructure. The Thames Tunnel is impressive.

The UK is really no worse than anywhere, though the pathology manifests differently.

London looks old and splendid, because the old race that built London was splendid and its civilisation was splendid.

Those parts that are new range from the mediocre (Canary Wharf) to the horrifying (Royal National Theatre).

What is most striking about the city is that no one dares tear anything down for (justified) fear that they could not put anything better in its place. None of these conservationists care about what the Georgians tore down, because the Georgians could build.

So you have eight immigrants living in eight one-room apartments in what was to its builders a lower middle class family home, to us looks like a mansion.